"What happened to German ww2 equipment?" Topic

After the surrender, quite a bit of German ww2 kit was around.

It took a while before either East or West Germany established new military forces officially, so what happened with all this stuff? Artillery, tanks, infantry arms, airplanes etc.

Taken by the allies, sold or given to foreign governments, and scrapped for the metal.

Fair bit seems to have made it's way to Arab and Israeli armies

,artin

As far as I know France took a lot of Panthers into service.

link

The Czechs persevered with the Me262:

link

There's bound to be more.

I suppose that most of it was used till it wore out and was quickly replaced. Almost all of the production lines for spare parts being either bombed out or turned to production of more mundane – and needed – items.

Recently, Russia has sold quite a bit of small arms as surplus. Captured and stored. After the war refurbished and stored long term. Here in Canada you can pick up all kinds of arsenal rebuilt Mauser rifles (ex-German, Slovak,and Romanian)and even Star B pistols(ex Bulgarian).

Don't forget all the weapons given away to revolutionaries and insurgencies from '45 until now.
Chinese Civil War, Indochina, Algeria and rest of asia and africa. I think I have seen pictures of Stg44s in almost every conflict in africa since '45.

A good deal of left-over German WW2 military equipment was kept in service by Yugoslavia and central European states in the postwar Soviet orbit. There was enough of it that the US Army included it in their early cold war guidebooks on Warsaw Pact forces.

Spain also.

B

When I lived in Bolivia in south america in 1978 the Bolivian Army wore German WW2 uniforms and equipment. And they had Sherman Tanks. I lived in a neighborhood right next to an army base. I would just look at those tanks all in working order and wish I could explore them.

Matthew

the Bolivian Army wore German WW2 uniforms and equipment. And they had Sherman Tanks

Just like the 'Battle of the Bulge' movie!

I saw a formation of Heinkel HE 111 bombers late 1950's near Madrid Spain as a kid. They were used in the Battle of Britain film I am told.

They had no idea what it was worth on fee-bay back then…..

Right on the HE 111's: they hired the entire Spanish bomber fleet that was taken out of service for about 2 weeks for filming. You can see where the Spanish roundels on the wing have been over painted in one take off scene. The aerial shots were taken from a modified B.25 Mitchell and the Stukas were RAF Percival Proctors in drag link

Finland had obtained a bunch of German equipment (StuGs, Panzer IV, panzerschrecks, 88 mm FlaK, anti-tank guns etc.) during the Continuation War, and these were kept in use for a time after the war, especially as training items. Some of the StuGs were also used for target practice at the end of their lifetime…

My understanding is that Switzerland also obtained some German equipment (like Hetzers) somewhere in the late war.

As above, the tiny minority of kit which was of any use /decently designed/had spares was flogged off in bargain basement surplus. The rest of it scrapped for the junk it mostly was.
The allies all had their own surplus mountain of universally superior kit so they didn't want any of it, so it just sold to people like Franco who the allies were very happy to have pay for equipment inferior to their own. Made perfect sense.

One US scheme even hid caches of surplus German kit all over Austria for use by 'partisans' pending being over run by the Ruskies.

Anyone else remember how many MP40s the US gave to the locals to arm the civilian irregular defense groups in vietnamese village defense?

In the early 80s the French Berlin brigade had a lot of German ww2 heavy trucks still in use.

Growing up, there was a tom-boy down the street who played Army with us boys. And she carried the MP-40 her dad brought back from WWII! She was the envy of us all :)

From a posting some time back, I understand that the non-combat vehicles captured by the Soviets were put into use to help rebuild the economy and infrastructure destroyed during the war. According to that poster, the combat vehicles were fed into the industrial maw as raw material.

If I can find the original post, I'll put it up later.

And don't forget that the Israeli Air Force used German Bf 109s as their first combat aircraft. They fought British Spitfires that were supplied to the Egyptian and Jordanian air forces.

Jim

Somewhere I have a picture of a Balkan deployment where one of the units we were working with was running over a large amount (hundreds)of K98s with a tank to destroy them. there was still tremendous amounts of equipment laying about.

Five hundred MP38s were used in the novel The Dogs of War.

The Swedish army used over a hundred 10.5 cm leFH 18 as late 1989, purchased during the war they had been mantained with loads of spare parts purchased as "scrap" in the years just after 1945. Likewise there was huge stocks of Ex-German panzerfaust and handgrenades used in the decades after the war. My father used both complete with the orignal German markings as a sergeant in the army during the early 1960's.

There were also a number of German 20mm AA guns in use well into the Cold War, mostly mounted as part of fixed defences.